A WELL KEPT SECRET !

One of the best kept secrets in the world of golf club equipment is that you can never fully trust the specifications that are either engraved on a clubhead or published by it’s manufacturer on their website. A great example is a driver head stamped 10.5° but in reality the loft is at 12° or higher.

For most readers this may sound preposterous but the reality is that it is next to impossible for even the best foundries/clubhead manufacturers in the world to produce clubheads that consistently always have the same loft, lie, face angle and weight. There are various reasons why which Tom Wishon explains really well farther down in this page. As a solution to this problem, companies who mass produce golf clubs to be sold off the rack could always perform some type of quality control where they would simply throw out every head found to be out of spec and keep the perfect ones, but this would raise the price of every golf club dramatically and would in turn make the OEMs business model unsustainable.

Now what is truly unfair to recreational golfers is not so much that golf heads come with production tolerances, but rather the lack of transparency of the golf club industry overall. What most companies fail to disclose is that everysingle head produced by ANY manufacturer comes with what we call “production tolerances”. In essence, what this means is that club head factories ( most based in China ) have an agreement to produce heads for all golf club companies with tolerances of no less than 1° for loft,1° for lie and never less than 2g per head.You can also add the crucial face angle to the driver,fairway wood and hybrid heads.

For the vast majority of amateur golfers an open face will produce a slice for example.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have measured countless sets of golf clubs over the years that were fairly decent in those categories,but never perfect and the vast majority fail this test pretty badly.

Here is a rare but great example of a company who discloses the margin of error to which their iron and wedge heads are being produced with. Note the last column on the right:

Cavity Back

2 Iron

3 Iron

4 Iron

5 Iron

6 Iron

7 Iron

8 Iron

9 Iron

PW

AW

SW

Tolerance

Right Hand (Degrees)

OUT

20

23

27

31

35

39

43

47

51

56

±1.0

Left Hand (Degrees)

17

20

23

27

31

35

39

43

47

51

56

±1.0

Lie Angle (Degrees)

59.5

60

60.5

61

61.5

62

62.5

63

63.5

63.5

64

±1.0

Weight (g)

237

244

251

258

265

272

279

286

293

297

301

±3.0

Offset (mm)

4.5

3.5

3

3

3

2.5

2.5

2.5

2.5

2.5

1

±1.0

Bounce (Degrees)

0

0

3

3

4

4

5

6

8

4

10

Now what’s the big deal if a head is 1° or 2° off the mark some may say? Well in some cases it is a big deal! Here is a situation I encounter frequently over the course of a golfing season, and I will add that I have seen cases like this one every year without exception for the last 12 years:

Windsor Ontario May 16 2016,

Jim Oxley comes for a fitting and wants to make sure his TaylorMade Aero Burner iron lofts are on target and would like the lie angles to be adjusted to his swing if need be.

So as standard procedure I start by registering all his irons for lofts and lies to see where we stand. These heads have never been bent in the past, they came off the production factory and were sold off the shelf with the following specifications:

Actual Website

Loft° lie° loft° lie°

4i 20.25 62 19 61

5i 22.75 62 22 61.75

6i 23.5 63.25 25.5 62.5

7i 29.5 63.25 29.5 63

8i 35 63.25 33.5 63.5

9i 38.5 63 38 64

Pw 43.25 64 43 64.5

gw 47.5 63.75 49 64.5

Ok, where should I start?! Well how about the fact that Jim paid a fair amount of money for a set of irons that doesn’t even come close to be within the acceptable tolerances of + or – 1° for lofts and lies?!

For an average male golfer who hits his 7 iron roughly 150 yards, 4° between irons will give him around a 10 yard gap between each club. Now for Jim the reality is that with his 70mph swing speed with the irons, he never ever saw a perceivable difference of distance between his 5 and 6 iron, and his 4i club is nothing short of unhittable.

Tuesday June 13 2017, David Cadieux brings in a set of Maltby forged irons he picked up in Florida as a second set, he thought the clubs weren’t right? Yeah no kidding!

Loft° Lie°

4i 23.75 57

5i 27.25 56

6i 30.5 59.5

7i 35.25 59.25

8i 36.25 60.75

9i 43.5 61.75

PW 48 61

GW 55 57.75

That was not pretty!

Monday October 8 2017, Louis from Windsor Ontario brings in his set of Ping irons which he bought brand new some years ago from a reputable pro shop and never had his irons either checked or bent:

Loft° Lie°

4i 22.5 63

5i 26 63.5

6i 26 63.5

7i 33.25 64.5

8i 36.75 65.5

9i 41 66.75

PW 45 66.75

SW 53 67.5

I must say I was taken by surprise on this one, did you spot it? All is very acceptable considering the tolerances all companies must deal with, well that is until you notice both the 5i and 6i have the same exact loft. Ping has some of the tightest tolerances of all major OEMs generally speaking, only once in my life have I run into something like this, it was a set of Taylormade irons that had the same loft on both the 6i and 7i. On a side note I was able to bend the Ping 6i up to 29° without any issue.

Again these are just a few examples among so many I have run into over the last several years, now of course if you buy custom golf clubs from J.R.GOLF you will never find yourself in such a predicament since all clubs are guaranteed to be right on spec, and even though many sets of clubs from various manufacturers fair better than these did, they are never fully on spec period. So do yourself a favor and have your specs checked if you buy clubs off the rack, it is well worth the small investment.

Here is another rare but great example of a company who discloses the margin of error to which their driver heads are being produced with. Note the last column on the right:

VC-420 Driver

LL

ML

Tolerance

RH Loft (Degrees)

9

10.5

± 1.0

Lie Angle (Degrees)

58

58

± 1.0

Volume (cc)

420

420

± 5.0

Weight (g)

202

202

± 2.0

Roll/Bulge (Inches)

10/10

10/10

± 1.0

Face Angle (Degrees)

0.5 Open

SQ

± 1.0

Face Height (mm)

54

54

±0.5

Face Width (mm)

107

107

±0.5

COR by CT Test

253

253

±5.0

This is why here at J.R.Golf we specialize in selling “certified clubs” that are guaranteed to be on spec. Please go to CERTIFIED CUSTOM GOLF CLUBS to find out more. http://jrgolf.ca/en/certified-clubs/

Club designer Tom Wishon explains why it is impossible to produce heads that meet their targeted specifications consistently:

“People who have never worked in the area of production manufacturing have a very difficult time understanding the reality of error tolerances. Most people believe that mistakes do happen, but many do think that it should be possible to make a high percentage of clubheads that would have every one of its production specifications dead on the spec. In fact, that is quite impossible to do because there are a lot of different specifications and each one has its own +/- tolerances and challenges to meet in the manufacturing process.The biggest factors that cause variations in the specs is different for each group of specifications.

1. Loft – for loft on woods, it is the welding of the parts of the head body that brings about the greatest chance for loft variation. Either the parts of the head do not mate together perfectly each time or the heat from the welding causes the space between the parts to change slightly. For investment cast irons, it is the shrinkage of the steel inside the casting shell as it cools that causes the variation in loft and in lie as well. As all steels cool from their molten state, they shrink. Inside the casting shell, the shrinkage causes a small space between the hosel and the inside of the casting shell. As the head cools, the hosel then can move one way or the other inside the casting shell. And when the hosel moves the lie and the loft will change. This is why ALL cast irons have to be checked and then adjusted as a normal course of manufacture.

2. Lie and Face Angle – For woods, it depends whether the head is all cast or if it is forged or plate formed. In a cast woodhead, the reason the lie and face angle can vary is the same explanation for why the loft and lie can change in a cast iron. It has to do with the shrinking of the metal when it cools inside the casting shell. For forged or plate formed woodheads, the variation in lie and face angle happens when the hosel is welded on to the body of the head as a separately attached piece of the head. When the hosel is welded on the head body, it can “pull” and move in one direction. Here again, all welded hosel heads are usually checked and then adjusted as a normal course of the manufacture of the heads.

3. Headweight – here the most common reason for variation is worker error. All clubheads are ground and polished for finishing by workers on different belt sanding and buffing polishing machines.

While the workers certainly are paid by incentive to do their best for weight tolerance, mistakes still are made. In addition, as the sanding belts wear from use, the same polishing procedure will remove less weight from the head than when the sanding belts are more new and rougher and not worn out. Making heads to a +/-2 gram tolerance for headweight is EXTREMELY GOOD – people who do not have any working experience in production manufacturing do not understand how hard it is to make head after head after head to all be within a +/-2g tolerance.

The reason that forged iron heads have a +/-3g tolerance is because all forged iron heads are electroplated on top of the carbon steel metal. This plating step has its own +/-1g tolerance. So the heads are all made and polished in preparation for plating finishing to a +/-2g tolerance just like all the cast stainless irons, but then when you have to electroplate the heads to finish them, you have this additional +/-1g tolerance from the plating process.”

Who is TomWishon?

With more than 35 years of experience in the field, Tom Wishon is recognized as one of the industry leaders in the research of golf club design, performance and clubfitting technology. He has been at the forefront of the golf industry including the development of more than 50 golf club design technology firsts as well as countless discoveries in the science of golf club performance for golfers.

Having begun his golf equipment career in 1972, Tom Wishon has designed over 300 original and innovative clubhead models, more than any other single person in the 500 year history of the game. His clubhead designs represent more than 50 different technology firsts.

Tom Wishon is the only designer from the custom clubmaking side of the golf industry whose clubhead designs have been used to win on the PGA Tour, the Champions Senior Tour and in Ryder Cup competition. He has designed and custom built the golf clubs used in competition by Scott Verplank, Bruce Lietzke, Ben Crenshaw, as well as the last set of clubs played by Payne Stewart before his tragic accident in 1999.

Tom is the also the author of 9 books within the field of golf club design, performance and clubfitting, in addition to hundreds of equipment related articles written for virtually every golf publication in the golf industry. As Terry McSweeney, Director of Communications for the PGA of America states, “Tom has the unique ability to communicate technical issues about golf equipment so non-technically minded people can easily understand and follow the subject”.

Two of Wishon’s books, The Search for the Perfect Golf Club and The Search for the Perfect Driver qualified for best-selling status and won successive Book of the Year awards in 2006 and 2007 from the International Network of Golf, the oldest and largest organization of golf industry media professionals in the world. Shortly after they were published, both books became a part of the curriculum for membership training in the PGA’s of Sweden, Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands.

He is considered the ‘go-to guy’ by the equipment editors for many of the major consumer golf publications in their search for honest, marketing-free explanations about the technical performance of golf clubs. Jim Achenbach, equipment editor for Golfweek magazine has said, “Tom is the smartest person in the golf industry when it comes to golf clubs.”

As Tom stated in making his decision to establish his own company in 2003, “I completely respect the product design work of the large golf equipment companies. But my three decades in golf club R&D has proven without question that the best set of golf clubs any golfer will ever play will be a set of professionally custom fit golf clubs, and not a set of standard made clubs simply bought off the shelf. I am committed to educating golfers about the tangible, game improvement benefits of being professionally custom fit because I know this is the only way any golfer can hope to play to the best of their ability and benefit the most from swing instruction.”

*** UPDATE *** Tom Wishon has sold Wishon golf to Diamond Golf International located in the UK in 2016, but he remains active as a consultant and designer of all their components .